As businesses and communities expand globally, the use of telephonic communications and other technologies have become vital in bridging the distances between offices and employees. These telephonic technologies have permitted individuals or groups of individuals to communicate with one another over significant distances in a setting that simulates an in-person meeting. Examples of such telephonic technologies include cellular telephones, call forwarding services, multimedia teleconferencing and internet telephony. For instance, cellular technology has provided a means for reaching an individual who may not be in proximity to a landline telephone. Similarly, video and non-video teleconferencing capabilities permit individuals (hereinafter, participants, attendees, conferees) to participate in a meeting without requiring each participant's physical presence in a single location. Thus, with these various telephonic technologies, co-workers in offices in different parts of the world are able to interact effectively in a virtual in-person meeting environment.
Modern teleconferencing technologies have developed the capability to handle teleconferences involving substantial numbers of participants. In addition, teleconferencing systems now provide advanced features such as teleconference recording and transcription. Recordation of conferences and meetings are gaining increasing importance as issues of accountability on both a business and individual level are becoming more prone to scrutiny. However, one significant disadvantage of current teleconferencing systems and methods is their inability to reproduce the benefits of speaking “off-the-record,” an often critical ability available in true in-person conferences and meetings. While modern systems allow for the deactivation of the recording of an entire meeting (i.e., no attendee is recorded), they do not provide the flexibility to record only specific legs (i.e., the audio, video, text and/or still image signals from a particular participant) of a teleconference. For example, a teleconference participant may request that the teleconference system disable the recording of his leg while maintaining the recording status of all other conference legs. Current systems would be unable to handle such a request as they are limited to toggling a basic recording on/off switch for the entire teleconference. As such, this limitation of modern teleconferencing systems may negatively constrain the level of interaction between conference participants.
Additionally, current teleconferencing methods broadcast audio and video from a conferee to all other conferees. As such, teleconference participants lose the ability to engage in a private conversation with another participant or participants with modern teleconferencing methods. In one instance, a teleconference participant may wish to make a private remark to another teleconference participant. Since current systems lack a method of allowing participants to conduct private conversations within a teleconferencing environment, the “private” remarks would be broadcast to all attendees. Thus, the lack of a method to handle private conversations within a teleconference may further limit the productivity and flexibility of such meetings.
For the foregoing reasons, a method and system of enhancing the flexibility of video and non-video teleconference recordation and control is needed.